8 The procurement process was handled well. The Service put together a business case, established an appropriate project management structure and appointed advisers after open competition. An initial market-sounding exercise was undertaken to gauge interest in the project. Expressions of interest were received from four consortia and, following a pre-qualification assessment, an Invitation to Negotiate was issued to three of them. The subsequent bids were evaluated against a range of criteria and, although the Consul bid was not the cheapest, it scored most highly across the selection criteria.
9 Although a traditional procurement was ruled out at an early stage because of insufficient capital funding, the Service prepared a nominal public sector comparator to test the cost of a PFI deal. This indicated that the overall cost of the preferred bid was marginally less than a conventional procurement. The comparator included substantial costs for carrying out remedial work and then mothballing the Crumlin Road Courthouse, a listed building, throughout the 25 years of the project. This made a material difference to the net present cost of a conventional procurement, increasing it by about £7 million relative to the PFI bid. If these costs are excluded, the comparator would have been considerably less expensive. The Service believes that there would have been no private sector interest, other than through the proposed PFI deal, in taking on the building. The Service considers that it would have been obliged to incur such costs for the Crumlin Road Courthouse throughout the 25-year period, if a conventional procurement had been possible, and that it was legitimate to include all the costs in the Public Sector Comparator.
10 The Service considered the issue of risk allocation from an early stage in the procurement process and achieved an allocation similar to other private finance contracts of this nature - transferring design, construction, commissioning and operating risks to the private sector. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the Service quantified the respective risks transferred and retained to enable a like for like comparison between the Public Sector Comparator and the PFI deal.